The Always God
Week 6 - Always Pursuing
Good morning. I’d like you to turn in your Bibles to Genesis 3. This is going to be the first passage we are going to look at together, but we are going to be hitting a lot of different passages, so we will have them up on the screen, and they are also available in the YouVersion outline for today. That way you won’t feel like you’re competing in Bible drill trying to look up all these verses.
We are continuing this week in The Always God series. I hope you have enjoyed studying how God is moving all the time. How He hasn’t changed over time, and how we can still experience him every single day in a very real way.
I wasn’t expecting this when I started this series, but its been amazing how often this series has tied in with a Bible study I did years called Experiencing God. Experiencing God is based on seven realities we find in God’s word:
Number 1, God is always at work around you, and Number 3, God invites you to join Him in his work: We talked about this when we talked about how God is always working.
Number 4, God speaks by the Holy spirit through Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and his ways. We talked about this when we talked about how God is always speaking.
Number 5, God’s invitation to join Him results in a crisis of belief that requires faith and action to resolve. [Number 6] In order to join God in his work, we have to make major adjustments in our life. We talked about this when we talked about some conditions in our hearts that keep us from hearing God, and keep God from hearing us.
So today I want to circle back to the second realty of Experiencing God. And before we do that, I want to make a commitment to you to lead an Experiencing God study group at the beginning of next year. It’s going to be an intense, twelve week study. It will require a lot out of you. But beloved, I truly believe that God is going to show you amazing things about Himself and His relationship with you if you put the work in on this study. So be watching for when that is going to begin.
Here’s the second reality: God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.
One of my all time favorite movies is The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones plays Detective Gerard of the US Marshalls, and he is hunting down Dr. Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford), a heart surgeon who is wrongfully accused of killing his wife. After he is convicted, Dr. Kimball escapes custody.
And for the rest of the movie, Gerard relentlessly pursues Kimball. Watch this short scene to give you an idea of how focused he is on capturing Harrison Ford:
[Scene]
Ok, I know this is kind of a weird image to use to describe God, but here’s what I want you to think about as we talk about a God who always pursues: There’s no giving up…no quitting…it’s not over until what is pursued is chased down!
It’s this kind of bold, aggressive, never-giving up pursuit that we read about and discover in God’s Word.
Because as committed as Tommy Lee Jones is to finding Harrison Ford and bringing him to justice, God is infinitely more committed to finding you.
But there’s a huge difference between God’s pursuit of you and Gerard’s pursuit of Kimball. And we will come back to that at the end of the sermon.
Let me pray for us, and then we will dive in to God’s Word.
Pray…
God pursues what is lost.
Now, most of us know what it means to be lost or to lose something of value to us. I read this week that the average American spends 2.5 days each year looking for lost items and “collectively costs U.S. households $2.7 billion dollars a year in replacement costs.”
And the Bible clearly teaches that God seeks and pursues the lost. In God’s word, we see that the search and rescue mission really began the moment we became lost. Remember in that clip we watched from The Fugitive, the search began just ninety minutes after the escape. And we see that in God’s Word. Look at Genesis 3.
You know the story. God created Adam and Eve to have a personal relationship with Him. He gave them one rule: Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I want you to depend on me for your understanding of good and evil. Don’t try to figure it out for yourself. I’ve seen the future. I’ve seen all the way to 2021 what a mess people are going to make when they decide for themselves what’s right and wrong. Just trust Me on this one.
But Adam and Eve don’t listen. Or they listen, but the don’t listen to God. They listen to the serpent, who convinces them to eat from the tree God told them not to eat from. Their eyes were opened, they saw they were naked, they covered themselves with fig leaves, and they hid.
Verse 8: And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool[c] of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
When it says “in the cool of the day,” the implication from the text is that this was later in the same day. So almost from the moment they were lost, God started looking.
9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”[d] 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
You know the rest of the story. God kept His word that Adam and Eve would surely die. They no longer would live forever in God’s presence. God cursed the serpent for deceiving His children. He told the woman He would greatly multiply her pain in childbearing (and all you that have ever gone through labor are going, Thanks, Eve!”)
He cursed the ground because of their sin. From then on, raising food from the ground would only come through sweat and hard work.
And then God banned Adam and Eve from the Garden They couldn’t remain in the garden in their sinful condition. Now, we always think that means God can’t be in the presence of sin because He’s so holy. But let’s look more closely at what’s going on.
In verse 22, God says,
22 Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—”
And it’s like, the thought is so horrible that God can’t even bring Himself to finish it. If they ate from the tree of life in their fallen state, then the man and woman would live forever in separation from God. And God couldn’t bear to think of that.
So it isn’t that God can’t be in the presence of sin. Remember, God took the initiative to look for Adam and Eve in their sinful condition. In verse 21, He made garments of skins and clothed them, in their sinful condition.
And thousands of years later, God Himself would be made flesh and would dwell among us… IN OUR SINFUL CONDITION! The worst thing the enemies of Jesus could say about Jesus was that He ate with tax collectors and sinners. (Matthew 9) And Jesus is like, “Yeah! That’s the point. He says, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners!”
Never in a million years did the religious leaders view God as a God that pursued those who were lost…as a God who sought after those who were not seeking him.
Commentator William Barclay says,
“No Pharisee had ever dreamed of a God like that. A great Jewish scholar has admitted that this is the one absolutely new thing which Jesus taught about God – that he actually searched for us. A Jew might have agreed that those who came crawling home to God in self-abasement and prayed for pity might find it; but he would never have conceived of a God who went out to search for sinners.”
Let this sink in, church! The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost. Yes, our sins separate us from God. But it is that very separation that caused God to draw nearer to us. To seek us. And to initiate a rescue mission.
So how does He do it? Secondly,
God’s pursuit of us is consistent with His character. Many of you probably know Psalm 23 by heart. Say verse 6 with me:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.
The Hebrew word translated “follow” is “rah-daff”. It’s a word that’s used over 150x in the Old Testament. It means chase. Pursue. Intend to catch. When Abraham’s nephew Lot was taken captive, Abraham radaffed his captors. When the Israelites were leaving Egypt, Pharaoh radaffed them (rawdaph). Usually people are “radaphed” by an army. With swords, and weapons, and war horses. Tommy Lee Jones is “radaffing” Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.
But what “radaffs” us according to Psalm 23?
Surely fear and intimidation shall follow me? Nope.
Surely disappointment and frustration will follow me? Nope.
Surely goodness and mercy will pursue me. Will chase me. Intends to capture me.
God’s pursuit of us is relentless. But it is consistent with His character!
If you are reading Gentle and Lowly, then you are seeing over and over that God’s heart toward us is good.
When Moses asked God to “show me your glory,” in Exodus 33:18, God responded with “I will cause all my goodness to pass before you.” Then, in chapter 34, God passes by Moses, proclaiming,
“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6)
And the phrase “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” shows up 13 times in scripture. If God was a major league baseball player, this would be his walk-up music.
God’s pursuit of us is consistent with His character. In Jeremiah 31:3, God says “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving kindness.”
In Hosea 11, the word says God led His people
4 I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
a little child to the cheek,
and I bent down to feed them.
God feels this way about us because He created us. Turn to Psalm 139. This is the most tender portrait of the God who pursues us, not to send us back to prison or bring us to justice like Tommy Lee Jones, but to bring us into fellowship. To bring us home.
139 O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
3 You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
7 Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
13 For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.[a]
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
God pursues us because He created us. God searches for us so that He can lead us home. Look at the last two verses of this amazing Psalm:
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts![c]
24 And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting![d]
Please, please don’t make the mistake of believing this is some indulgent, wink-and-nod and look the other way treatment of our sin. God’s hatred of sin and His wrath against sin is absolute. But don’t miss this: God’s wrath is poured out on sin. Yes, God punishes people, but don’t imagine for a moment that the Lord takes pleasure in it. Ezekiel 33:11– I take NO PLEASURE in the death of the wicked.” Lamentations 3:33 says that the Lord does not afflict “from the heart.” So while He does afflict and punish sin, His heart is literally “not in it.” This is why the Puritan Jonathan Edwards called judgment “God’s strange work,” and mercy His “natural work.”
One more: in the New Testament, Paul describes it this way in his letter to Titus:
“For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness [there it is again— goodness and mercy] of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” Titus 3:3-7
Paul talks about the goodness and loving kindness of God our savior “appearing”. Jesus is literally goodness and mercy made flesh.
Number 3, God pursues by staying
This seems weird. How can you pursue someone and stay put? But that’s exactly what God does.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Six Flags over Georgia. And the very first place my mom took me— before we rode a single ride, before I ate a single rocket pop or bought a hat or anything else— my mom took me to the LOST PARENTS cabin [slide]. At the time, I thought, this is the dumbest thing ever. This is where parents go when they get lost. And honestly, if a parent can’t spend a day at six flags without getting lost, they probably can’t be trusted to take children to an amusement park in the first place.
But my mom got down on one knee in front of me. She held me by the shoulders to make sure I was listening. She looked me in the eye, and said, “Jimmy, if we get separated at any point in the day, I want you to come straight here. This is where we will be. This is where you can find us.
I didn’t understand it then, but now that I’m a parent (soon to be a grandparent), I understand it a lot better. When someone is lost, there are times when it makes sense to go look for them. But there’s a risk with that. Because if both of you are moving, there’s always the chance you are moving away from each other.
A lost person needs to know that there is a place they can go that won’t move. If they can find their way back, they will be home.
I think this is what Jesus was getting at when he told the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. I know we talked about that pretty recently, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. But if you remember Luke 15, Jesus actually told three stories about lost things in a row. A sheep wandered away from the flock, and the shepherd left the 99 sheep to go searching for the one.
A woman loses one coin out of ten, and she turns her house upside down to look for the one.
But when Jesus tells the story of a father whose son takes his share of the family inheritance to a far country and squanders it all, the father doesn’t go off into the far country to search for his son. Instead, he stays home, always making sure that when his son finds his way back, he has a home to come home to.
And the son finds his way back.
Luke 15:16-24 – “And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. 17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ 20 And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran (totally undignified in that day for a man to run like this, but this Father doesn’t care!) and embraced him and kissed him.
What a picture…what an image…a Father running to hug and welcome his lost son home.
Charles Spurgeon preached a sermon called “Many Kisses for Returning Sinners” and he preached an entire sermon on that small phrase - “and kissed him.”
He writes: “See the contrast. There is the son, scarcely daring to think of embracing his father, yet his father has scarcely seen him before he has fallen on his neck. The condescension of God towards penitent sinners is very great. He seems to stoop from His throne of glory to fall upon the neck of a repentant sinner. God on the neck of a sinner! What a wonderful picture!”
It is truly a wonderful picture. A picture of God not only running toward the wayward and lost, but embracing him.
Sometimes, God pursues by staying put. He never changes his character. He never lowers his expectations. He never modifies His word to adapt to the changing times. And the result is that the lost person has something to come home to.
Beloved church family, we as a church will never water down the truth of God’s word in order to accommodate a changing culture. Sin is still sin and must be repented of. God is still holy, Heaven is still heavenly and hell is still horrifying.
But when sin loses its attractiveness; when the promises of sexual freedom and following your own truth burn themselves out; the church will still be here, ready to receive repentant sinners. Our job is to leave the porch light on, and watch the horizon for the prodigal to come home.
I want to tell you about the time I was furthest from God.
In my senior year of college, I was dating a girl named Beth. Beth had been in our high school youth group, and I had always been infatuated with her. She got pregnant by her high school boyfriend, and dropped out of school to have the baby. When her daughter was old enough to be left for the day, Beth started going back to school at Georgia State where I was attending. We started dating, and within a month of we were engaged. We prayed together at the end of every date. I was about to graduate college and would start seminary in January. We drove up to the seminary to look at housing, as well as at preschools for the little girl I would adopt as soon as we got married.
But shortly after we got back from that trip, Beth gave the ring back. She apologized for saying yes in the first place, because she realized she saw me more as a father to her daughter than a husband for herself.
That started me on a downward spiral that lasted for about six months. I think I stayed drunk for most of that time. I was so angry at God for what I saw as Him lying to me. I mean, we had prayed so many times, thanking God for bringing us together.
I did a lot of things to run from Him. It is only by His grace that I was too naïve to know how to find drugs, because if I had, I would have tried those too.
But through all that, God never stopped pursuing me. No matter what bar I was in, every conversation seemed to turn back to God. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Finally, I wound up in a Catholic monastery outside of Atlanta for a weekend of silence. The only time I spoke was when I would chant the Psalms with the monks in chapel, five times a day.
And I remember kneeling on the stone floor of the monastery chapel at like two in the morning, asking God why He had allowed all this to happen. Telling Him how angry and lost and hurt and confused I was. I felt like He had pulled the rug out from under my feet. I had reoriented my life around the idea that I I was going to be a husband and father, and suddenly I was neither. I asked God why he had lied to me—to us—whenever we thanked Him for bringing us together.
And the closest I think I’ve ever come to hearing God speak in an audible voice, I felt God saying, “I never lied to you. You were lying to yourself in my name. It’s time to come home. And by the way, you need to forgive Beth.”
So I started the journey back. I can’t say it was automatic and immediate. God didn’t take away the desire to drink and self-medicate. But I did forgive Beth. And when I look back on my life, and all that I’ve been able to do, and how different my life would have been if I had started seminary as a married father.
And then I look at Trish, and my sons, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how kind God was to NOT give me what I thought I wanted at the time.
Lamentations says that God doesn’t afflict from the heart, or grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3:33) It isn’t God’s heart to rip the rug out from under us. And faith is knowing that God pursues a love relationship with us that is real and personal, and sometimes that means that we don’t always get what we think we want at the time, but that God always is working the best possible outcome for His children.
Conclusion
If you’re here this morning and not in a relationship with Jesus…that means you are here this morning and lost.
And God brought you here today as a way of pursuing you so you could hear this message of His love and surrender your life to him.
Because you can’t outrun the one who is pursuing you.
There’s another famous scene in The Fugitive. It’s so short that it doesn’t make much sense to show it, so I’ll just tell you about it. Harrison Ford, Dr. Richard Kimble is in a stand-off against Detective Gerard. And he yells, “I didn’t kill my wife.” And he didn’t. He is not guilty of the crime he’s charged with. But Tommy Lee Jones yells right back— “I don’t care.” Guilt or innocence wasn’t an issue. Gerard’s job was to bring a fugitive to justice.
But here’s the thing with us: we ARE guilty of the crime we are charged with. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We deserve punishment.
And God does care. Very much. So much that He sent his son to pay the price for our sin. So God relentlessly pursues us. He will chase us down to whatever flophouse or outhouse or henhouse we find ourselves in.
This is the gospel. This is why Jesus came to earth and lived a perfect life and died for me and you.
- It was the ultimate way God would show how he pursues us.
- It was the ultimate way God would show the lost how much they are valued…how much he loves them.
Romans 5:8 – “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Don’t buy into this idea that you don’t matter…that your life isn’t worth anything…that’s straight from the pit of hell.
I recently learned that suicide is up 33% over the last two decades. It’s the 2nd leading cause of death between those 10-34 years of age.
Don’t listen to the enemy telling you that your life is hopeless, meaningless and that you don’t have value. You do matter and have since before you were born.
Let’s pray.
